Why some of you guys are getting butt-hurt because people say that boxing is simple makes no damn sense.

Like I said parsing and semantics.

Fake is on the money about this. Like many things (chess, sex, ...), there are senses in which boxing is very simple, and other senses in which it is complex; but simple isn't bad.

Boxing's simplicity is part of what makes it great. The best boxing writers have written brilliantly about it, partly because its simplicity allows it such symbolic power and gives it such primal force and deep appeal (Jack London, Ring Lardner, James Baldwin, Arthur Conan Doyle, O Henry, Nelson Algren, A. J. Liebling, Joyce Carol Oates, Jimmy Cannon, Heywood Hale Broun, Red Smith, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, ... we can argue about who does or doesn't make the list). It will be interesting to see whether any comparable literature develops around MMA.

In any sport, an expert observes much more going on than a casual fan, but boxing is also simple in the sense that the most casual fan can generally get a good sense of who is winning and at least part of why.

Of course, there are fewer combinations in boxing than in striking disciplines where you strike with hands, elbows, knees, and feet, for example. So, boxing is simpler comparatively in that sense. And any combat sport that incorporates grappling and striking is going to be more complex in some senses that any sport that is purely one or the other.

But so what? Boxing involves its own kinds of complexity, as I pointed out earlier, and its own kind of beauty and grace and violence and primal confrontation. Just like other great combat sports do. And when the best practitioners engage in it at the highest level, it is one of the most exciting athletic events there can be. I feel sorry for you guys who were too young to see the great heavyweight bouts of the 1970s and the great welterweight & middleweight fights of the 1980s.

In the early-to-mid 2000s, there was a huge flowering of fantastic fighters, all fighting each other at and around lightweight (130). If you missed that golden period, too, there are a ton of good, exciting fighters now at 140 (Junior Middleweight) and 154 (Junior Middleweight). If you ignore the endless courtship between Floyd and Manny, there are a lot of exciting fighters out there, even though the heavyweight drought continues.

So, keep watching MMA. And anything other MA they put on: Muay Thai, K-1, college wrestling meets, ... . No reason to choose, folks. Share the love with all the combat sports. Just don't forget the combat sport that paved the way into America's living rooms and made "Terdsak" a household name in Thailand.

I don't mean to masturbate a dead horse, but I can't emphasize enough how horrible the Bruce vs. Jackie community was. Take, for example, one member who went by the handle "five-animals". In an email conversation I had with him years ago, he claimed an effective counter to the double-leg takedown was grabbing both of your attacker's arms, falling to your back, and up kicking him in the face. He claimed he pulled this off against a training partner in the gym once (I assume another kung-fu student) so it must be effective against wrestlers.

The bad part about that is that he was the most intelligent member on the site by a HUGE fucking margin.

Oh... Oh God. It's just like Stephen King's IT. The memories are flooding back into my mind all at once. If I can't control it I'll end up like Stanley Uris!